Adobe Steps Back From ALM Precipice

In one of the most significant victories for software customers in many years, Adobe announced late last week that it will disable its Adobe License Manager (ALM) technology for volume license copies of Acrobat 8. For once, enough customers pushed back against an overly burdensome anti-piracy to force the vendor to back down. On its web page announcing the change, Adobe says that in the months since it introduce

In one of the most significant victories for software customers in many years, Adobe announced late last week that it will disable its Adobe License Manager (ALM) technology for volume license copies of Acrobat 8. For once, enough customers pushed back against an overly burdensome anti-piracy to force the vendor to back down.

On its web page announcing the change, Adobe says that in the months since it introduced ALM with Acrobat 8, "we have learned that ALM requires a greater level of administrator resources than many of our customers have available to them. In some instances, there have also been difficulties in managing certain customer workflows and requirements." As ALM use was still voluntary, those who were using it can revert to the ALM-disabled version of Acrobat.

Before we go any further, let me just make it clear that this decision regarding ALM only affects Acrobat volume license customers. Consumer versions of Acrobat and many other Adobe products still have product activation (which can cause its own problems, as we just recently heard again), so Adobe is not backing away from all forms of copy protection. Still, as we discussed when I broke the news about ALM, Adobe was the first major publisher to incorporate vendor-specific license tracking technology in its product, so it's important to note that they've had such serious second thoughts.

So why did Adobe change its mind? From what I've been hearing from readers, it appears that customers made it clear they weren't going to accept vendor-specific licensing tools. "From what we've seen, Adobe did a reasonable job in keeping ALM relatively unobtrusive," wrote one reader after his company had finished its analysis of ALM. "But there's a slippery slope if we go down that road. What if 18 months from now Adobe's having a bad quarter and needs a quick boost to revenues? Will they hold to the privacy promises they're making now about not giving the sales side your licensing data? So we've told Adobe we won't be moving to 8.0 or any other product that's going to require ALM."

ALM scares those customers who know they don't have a good handle on their licensing, and seems like an undue burden for those who do. "It's not a tool that can tell us anything we don't already know from our software asset management system," said another reader. "But we have some departments that have to do a lot of reimaging, so making sure our licensing pool gets credited each time an e-license is redeployed would be a painful chore. And the cost of dedicating servers and staff just to tracking Adobe licenses ... it's not going to happen."